Digital Day: designing the future

“In two decades, we will have made more progress than in the past two millennia; artificial intelligence will catch up to human intelligence, and we will no longer be able to tell robots apart from humans”. These are the words of José Cordeiro, the Director of the Millennium Project, during his contribution to the latest Digital Day, held at our company headquarters in Madrid.

Unlike Cordeiro, who is certain that we will see the transition to automation and robotisation in all areas of life, Marc Vidal, a specialist in Digital Transformation, discounts robots and is firmly convinced that human beings alone will be responsible for the coming innovation. “Robots will always be machines, so they will never have emotions, intuition, imagination, creativity – characteristics which are peculiar to the human race – and for this reason, they are and will always remain a major challenge for businesses”, Vidal says. “Machines are good at simulating things, but we are good at creating them”.

This idea is in keeping with the view of Isaac Hernández, Google Cloud Country Manager for Spain and Portugal, who stated plainly that “innovation is a combination of people and technology; the latter needs the former in order to exist”. He added, “We need to empower individuals to produce innovative ideas: rather than telling them what to do, we have to give them the power to tell us what we need to change.”

“Innovation is a combination of people and technology; the latter needs the former in order to exist”

– Isaac Hernández, Country Manager, Spain and Portugal, Google Cloud

According to Vidal and Hernández, it is important to place people right where they need to be – at the heart of our businesses – and have no fear of robots. “Robots do not destroy jobs; they merely complement them”, stressed Marc Vidal. “The digital transformation is not a question of adding technological components, but rather of incorporating technology, combining all the elements and creating something new. We need to assimilate technology and meet it head on”.

Understanding the Blockchain

Also present at the Digital Day was Alex Sicart, a 19-year-old student from Barcelona, who has been running his own business since age 13. He was interviewed by the General Manager of Market here at Endesa, Javier Uriarte. The young man, who was recognised by Forbes Magazine as one of the 300 most influential young people in Europe, gave us a little insight into the world of Blockchain.

“The Blockchain is something that everyone’s talking about, but not many people know what it really is”, said Sicart. Briefly, “the Blockchain is a decentralised database that holds a record of peer-to-peer transactions. It changes depending on the context in which it is applied and generates a permanent, immutable record of all the information involved in all those transactions”, he explained.

In the young entrepreneur’s view, “the Blockchain can change our lives in many ways, so it is important to adapt it and facilitate the use of all programmes, so they are accessible to everyone”, he asserted. He also said that the Blockchain “is not something that can be learnt at universities, but through the internet and other information media and training methods”.

“The Blockchain can change our lives in many ways, so it is important to adapt it and facilitate the use of all programmes, so they are accessible to everyone”

– Alex Sicart, student and entrepreneur

Interactive workshops

The importance of teamwork was emphasised by Alberto Levy, an expert in Innovation and a member of the World Economic Forum on Technology and Information, during one of the technology workshops he gave at the second Digital Day, called the Future Workshop. During the workshop, the attendees worked on a series of challenges set by the professional, pooling their ideas until they reached the final challenge, where they had to come up with an innovative idea for a product or service not yet on the market.

This and three other interactive workshops – Virtual Reality Glasses, Endesa Museums and Interactive Musical Experience – were attended by company employees and influencers in the sector, who were able to get “hands on” with technology.

At Endesa, as part of our commitment to innovation, we have launched initiatives like the Digital Day, where our employees can get involved and put forward their own ideas in the creation of a smarter, more innovative future of energy. As Albert Levy said during the event, “we can design whatever we want for the future” because we hold in our hands the power to shape the world that we really want to have.

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